Other ways of knowing and doing

I30

We [First Nations communities] were the original communists without the authoritarianism, really, truly. There's ways we have of dealing with stuff that I think is directly applicable to all the stuff we're talking about. The idea of a council, of people doing things as a collective where they have to come to a consensus and come to agreement….the community decides and that's the difference between a collective model and a hierarchical, pyramidal way of doing things. It's done in a circle not a pyramid.

Reproducing violence

I20

One of the things...I saw a little bit while working in other countries that had had big revolutions, like Cambodia for example or some Latin American countries, is sometimes the revolution is as frightening as what was there before. It may change the power...but it doesn't seem to change what happens to people in terms of violence in their day to day life [or allow better] access to the things that they fought for. So I guess some element of me is as leery of what we will do in the name of change...

Beginning with the basics

I11

I like Food not Bombs because I think that having food and...sharing food is... one of the most...basic things. If we can do that then we can do everything else...or we can work towards doing everything else for ourselves too.

Talking – or not – about patriarchy

I26

A really sad truth...is that when you start talking about patriarchy, people shut down.

No return

I22

I think the world is pregnant with dangers, to use an unfortunate metaphor, it's pregnant, it's full. War,...[w]e haven't even spoken about...the environmental crisis. People operate in sort of a linear epistemology and what we see with the environmental crisis, it's exponential. So in our lifetimes, ten, fifteen years down the road, it's not short, we could see even greater calamities because who knows how these complex systems interact? So there's all of these issues and so to solve all of these people need to realize that none of these can be solved by believing that...we can go back to the past and that these people [in power] can be pressured into going back into the past because history doesn't work that way.

Reaching people

I7

There's lots of people who, if you tap into their values in the right way, will be able to get onside with you in a way that at least will keep us going, that at least will keep us on a more positive track. I think it's just a matter of bringing out those values and framing them in such a way that they enable us to make more intelligent political decisions.

The future, darkly

I18

I'm cynical and pessimistic so I'm just going to tell you my science fiction dystopia. Everything will be privatized, more than fifty per cent of the people will live in total poverty, those who don't will be eking by except for a much smaller top of the pile, [the] twenty-first century aristocracy, who have access to the latest technology to spy on us and control our behaviours. They can censor whatever, they can use this media...to message us in any way they want repetitively to the point where we believe whatever [they] want [us] to believe….[A]ny opponents will be disappeared, concentration camps, the whole nine yards.

Organize where you are

I27

You have to organize where you are. If you go to high school, you organize high school students, you don't organize pensioners or something. If you're a...pensioner you organize other people who are like you, you organize your friends, you organize. And that's something that's really important, it's building those [struggles] link by link, person by person. So if you're doing environmental organizing...you're bringing a radical perspective that links that struggle to other struggles. People often come into being active or caring about certain things through particular...issues, right? Going through the process of gaining a political consciousness...usually centers around one thing and then hopefully there's people there who can make links between that one thing and a broader perspective of capitalism, a broader perspective of a whole range of things.

Building to revolution

I30

The point is to keep doing something until...there comes a point where everything shifts….all the things that people understand [come through struggle], not by some theoretical discussion, [but] by creating an action based on what it is people want and when you do that action, the action itself leads to awareness….Little by little, incrementally, those things shift and quite frankly that's what a revolution is. It's kind of like boiling water, you put the pot on and at one point it's 210, and then at 211 it gets real hot, and then at 212 it turns into steam, something totally different, that's a revolution.

In between winning and losing

I15

I can't conceptualize political movements as win-lose. Maybe I could conceptualize them as winning and losing in that it's a constant process. I don't think there is anything to win. Not only is it a myth but also it’s dejecting. If I try and think about what it would mean to win, I just can't, it's not possible for my brain to think about that and so anything that comes short of having won is then a failure. Even if I were to try and conceptualize winning and losing, obviously, I think right now we're losing but I do feel like I make gains when I have a conversation with my sister and...at the end of the conversation [she] commits to changing her behaviour in some way that I find impedes her ability to have meaningful social relations with other people, especially other women.